13. Carrington #3
Lucy’s fingers slowed to a stop, but she kept her hand there. It was warm and present, the way Lucy's hands were always touching something. For the first time in years, Carrington let herself be the thing that was touched.
Then it was quiet. The window was open two inches at the bottom, the way she left it every night of the year, and the courtyard was doing nothing at all outside it.
Lucy came up the bed and lay against her side with one leg over hers. She put her palm flat on Carrington's stomach and left it there. Carrington's breathing went up under it and came down under it, and after a while it slowed.
Some time later, Lucy got up and used the bathroom and came back with a glass of water and drank half of it standing at the end of the bed, then handed the rest across.
"Your taps are ridiculous," Lucy said.
"I've never looked at them," Carrington said.
"No," Lucy said. "I don't suppose you have."
Lucy didn't get back into the bed. She crossed to the far corner instead, where the sheet had come out from under the mattress in a long gray rope.
She picked it up and shook it out and started tucking it back in, working along the side with the heel of her hand, completely naked, at one in the morning.
"Leave it," Carrington said.
"It'll be under your back all night," Lucy said, and finished the corner, and did the bottom one too because she was already down there.
Carrington drank the water and put the glass on the nightstand next to the heap of pins and watched her do it.
When Lucy was finished, she came back around and got back in bed, pulled the covers up over both of them, and settled her arm where it had been.
Her hair was a wreck. There was a red mark coming up on her shoulder that was going to still be there on Sunday.
The clock said twenty past one. In forty minutes, the path lights would go off on the timer and the sixty feet down to the cottage would be black, and Lucy had walked it up here in a coat with no gloves on and would walk it back the same way.
Carrington wanted her in this bed in the morning. "Don't go back down the path tonight."
Lucy didn't answer for a while.
"The lights go off in half an hour," Carrington said. "And the gravel carries, and the chef lets herself in through the courtyard at six, so you'd have to be back before—"
She stopped.
None of that was why. She was lying in her own bed with a woman's arm across her, arranging a schedule.
"Okay," Lucy said.
"That's all?" Carrington asked.
"That's all," Lucy said, and turned the lamp off.
At ten past four, Carrington was still awake.
Lucy had fallen asleep somewhere before two, on her front, with one arm up under the pillow and her face turned away, and she had not moved since.
Carrington lay on her back with her hands folded on top of the covers and looked at the ceiling and then at the room.
Two shoes by the chair, not together. The cardigan Lucy had been wearing under the coat, dropped on the seat, with both sleeves still shoved up past where the elbows had been, because Lucy had not pulled a sleeve back down since the day she got here.
A glass with an inch of water in it. And the pins on the nightstand, seven or eight of them in a pile where Lucy had taken them out of her hair.
Everything else on that floor was Lucy's.
Out the window, the courtyard and the kitchen wing were black.
At twenty to six, the light over the range would come on, and then the one in the back passage, and by seven there would be a van at the service gate and somebody on the stairs with a basket.
Grace got up at ten past seven and came down the landing past this door in bare feet, every morning, and stood in the kitchen doorway waiting to be told what day of the week it was.
Carrington's hands were cold on top of the covers.
She slid them under. Thirty years, and she had never once lain down with a problem and failed to have it in pieces by morning.
The school picnic was in eight days. Eleven o'clock, the shelter with the roof, two hundred parents.
She lay there and looked at the ceiling and did not do one thing about any of it.
At half past four, she got up out of bed. She did it slowly, a leg at a time, and Lucy made a noise into the pillow but didn't wake. Carrington lifted the robe off the back of the door and stepped out onto the landing and pulled the door closed behind her without letting the latch click.
Grace's door was second on the left and standing ajar. The night light was in its socket, and Grace was face-down on the pillow with one foot sticking out from under the blanket and the gray rabbit tucked somewhere under her arm.
Carrington stayed a while in the hallway, even though nobody needed anything from her. Then she went back down the landing and got the door open without noise and let herself back in her bedroom with her hand still on the handle.
Lucy had rolled over. She had taken most of the covers with her and left the corner turned back on the near side. She was breathing with her mouth open into the pillow.
Carrington took the robe off, and laid it on the chair with the cardigan, and crawled back into bed.